Some of you have been experiencing connection delays or failures when
connecting to shellx.
These have been caused by an interaction between libwrap which
attempts to identify the owner of the process making the connection on the
callers machine, with the firewall on your machines.
Specifically, when you connect, xinetd calls libwrap for access
control. Libwrap attempts to do an RFC1413 ident request on your machine
but because your machine is firewalling port 113 and dropping the incoming
packet, it just sits until it times out.
The timeout is 30 seconds. This either causes a 30 second delay, or
in the case of some client software that times out first, a complete
failure to connect.
I've recompiled xinetd on shellx to remove libwrap support since
everything on that machine is pretty much ALL@ALL in the hosts.allow
anyway. This gets rid of the RFC1413 attempt and thus the connection
delays or failures.
A longer term solution will be to recompile libwrap with a shorter
more reasonable timeout. But because of library versioning issues that
will take more research.
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